Tech Toolkit: How to pursue ‘responsive Web design’

In the technology world, one of the newer phrases taking hold is “responsive Web design,” a strategy that calls for crafting sites that make navigation easier.

Usually done through less content and more images, the approach aims for an optimal viewing experience across multiple device types, which means that it shouldn’t matter whether a site visitor surfs in from a laptop or a smartphone; your company’s site and brand image would be consistent.

“We think about this approach as responsive service design,” says Nancy Lyons, president and CEO of Minneapolis-based digital agency Clockwork Active Media. “It’s more than multichannel. It’s intuitive and user customizable. It’s not just about two-way conversations with brands — it’s truly experience-driven engagement that facilitates business.”

The amount of buzz around responsive Web design and other cutting-edge design tactics should serve as a wake-up call for some companies, especially those that have relied on the same website for a number of years. Content-heavy pages, long blog posts, clumsy mobile navigation and other relics of the past should be considered for the chopping block.

What’s also driving the push for responsive Web design is Google’s announcement in 2013 that it would penalize sites that aren’t mobile-compliant.

“Google’s announcement was a red flag for Web developers and business owners,” Terry Low, CEO of Bloomington-based Byte Technology, said in a previous Tech Toolkit column about 2014 trends. “We really had to change the way we deliver the product.”

Want to make a better impression for the year ahead? Then maybe it’s time to take a serious look at your company’s website. Here are some ideas for freshening up site content, regardless of industry:

Consider how users approach transactions

If your company has a retail component, or encourages user interaction in some way (such as through online client surveys), then it might be time to tweak how transactions are handled by the website. Lyons believes that discussions about transactions should go beyond thoughts about mobile versus desktop and move instead into the realm of how customers interact with a site.

“We’ve been talking about ‘transactions anywhere,’” she says. That means discovering how customers can have more options for buying, talking, publishing, participating, and sharing content regardless of device type.

Refine navigation

If your site hasn’t done usability testing since its launch, then it’s likely time to recheck how newer users navigate through the content, and how they perceive that content as well. Too many click-throughs, vague headers, and broken links can make a site seem unprofessional. To do an informal navigation experiment, create a task for someone who hasn’t used your site before — such as “tell me what the company provides” or “find out how to contact customer service” — and then gauge the ease and speed with which the user can perform those tasks.

Pay particular attention to a site’s “About” and “Contact Us” pages, advises Martha McCarthy, cofounder and CEO of Minneapolis-based social media consulting firm The Social Lights. “Although responsive design favors less text, these pages are still very important,” she says. “Prospects will always want to know who you are, what you do, and how to get in touch.”

Make sure blogs are updated

Many companies launch blogs and enthusiastically update them for a few months or a few years, and then quietly stop putting up new content. But users will be able to see when a blog is last updated, and if a company leader’s last compelling thoughts are from 2011, that might make the company itself seem stagnant.

Social media tools can be substituted for traditional blogging, says McCarthy, but many of her company’s clients see results doing both, as long as content is updated at least two to five times per month. Also, promoting the blog posts on social media will drive inbound leads and help with search engine optimization or SEO.

“When push comes to shove, I’d always recommend having a Facebook/Twitter presence over a company blog, but having both means more traffic and getting in front of more customers,” McCarthy says. “The nice thing about the ‘bite-sized content’ trend means that blog posts definitely don’t need to be lengthy, since our social media attention spans can only handle so much.”

Talk now about future of your Web presence

Refreshing a company website is a significant undertaking, and it’s likely that any transition will be a gradual one. But it’s worth talking with your Web-development professionals now about larger strategy, like user experience, customer engagement, social media, and especially mobile technology. Work together to create a vision that includes strategic rebuilds, advises Low of Byte Technology.

“Part of our work as web developers is to provide education, and to help clients understand the impact of any changes,” Low says. “This year will bring some big changes in Web development, so it pays to start having those conversations now.”

Elizabeth Millard has been writing about technology for 18 years. Her work has appeared in Business 2.0, eWeek, Linux Magazine and TechNewsWorld. She attended Harvard University and formerly served as senior editor at ComputerUser.